January 2008

Dreamweaver vs. Content Management part II

January 31, 2008

My position on Dreamweaver is no secret. Last fall I was talking with a colleague and journalism professor about the need for journalism schools to teach content management principles as part of their programs. A communications professional who knows nothing about Dreamweaver can have a bright future. A communications professional who knows only a little about content management is in big trouble.

After we were discussing the course yesterday evening I opened up Google Reader and read Ken Rickard's post about Amy Gahran's wonderful Poynter Online article about just this topic. Here are some of the high points from Gahran's article:

Apparently, this j-school (like many others) offers little or no training in true CMS-based tools. Their online courses focus on Dreamweaver.

That's a big problem, because tools embody mindsets. Focusing on Dreamweaver teaches exactly the wrong mindset for online journalism: that your Web site is mainly an island unto itself.

Quickly adding imagecache and lightbox to posts on Drupal sites

January 31, 2008

Following up on yesterday's post this is a quick and dirty guide to adding images to blog posts using and . The effect of these together is to create an image like the one in this post. When clicked the image will display in an overlay on this page thanks to lightbox. Imagecache handles making a static copy of the image available and resizing the image to provide several predefined sizes.

It is possible to do similar things in much better ways. For example creating an image field and a template for displaying posts that include the image. This method is a quick and dirty method using a minimum of additional modules. With Drupal 6 the module will make this method even simpler.

The first step is to setup the necessary modules (imagecache and lightbox v2). The has some information about setting up presets for imagecache. The latest version of imagecache has new settings that deprecate some of the old settings. See the image in this post for a glance at what is in the newest CVS version.

jQuery goodness

January 29, 2008

While listening to the Drupal I decided it was time to take the plunge and do a few jQuery/Javascript things here. So comments will now preview live as they are being entered and thanks to the combination of imagecache (not jQuery related) and lightbox the pictures appearing in the more recent posts now display with the lightbox effect.

Occam's razor applies to technology too

January 23, 2008

Sometimes it takes a simple reminder that Occam's razor or the keep it simple stupid principles apply to most things in the technical realm just as it does to the real world.

In the server meltdown last week the data was all recovered but some problems with the backups made it impossible to get all of the file directories. The net result was a friend's WordPress blog melted down. Or at least all the goodies were gone. In the process of renewing the site and getting it updated a tagging plugin no-longer worked. As we talked this afternoon I looked through the database and figured out the schema and what was happening. Quickly enough I hit on a few simple queries and realized I could convert the data.

After another backup of the database it was time to set about migrating the data. The first query is:

INSERT IGNORE into wp_terms (slug, name, term_id) SELECT lower(replace(replace(replace(wp_tags.tag, '.' , ''), "'", ""), "", '')) a, replace(replace(wp_tags.tag, '-', ' '), '_', ' ') b, NULL
FROM wp_tags

That runs perfectly and it was time for step two. Or it was really time for step one. Not a major WordPress user I am not terribly familiar with the community. But it hit me that I was probably not the first person to be doing this. Maybe somebody else had published the SQL to make this process easier.

CSV Parser for PHP

January 21, 2008

This is a snippet of code that I had posted on another of my websites and in doing some cleanup it really fits better here.

I spent last evening working on a Comma Separated Values (CSV) list of titles for a project I'm working on. Below is a snippet of code I worked with. The first method from the suggests using . That woks pretty well but the native function in PHP doesn't handle values (fields) that contain separators (commas) very well and doesn't have the concept of multiple values being delimited by a different delimiter within a field. So I whipped up the parser that comes second in the example below.

Lullabot workshops and server rebuilds

January 16, 2008

Lullabot LogoIt has been a busy 2008 so far. I spent the first full week of the year at the in beautiful, rainy, Portland. It didn't take long to figure out that I also really wanted to head off to the in February as well. I came home ready to wrap up a couple of projects and spend countless hours working on patches and uber-cool modules and hacks for all kinds of sites.

Short shell script for speeding up getting Drupal modules

January 15, 2008

What follows is a short shell script I use for making it easier to get modules from the Drupal repository. It is best to use this script only with sources where you have a great deal of confidence in the source of the file you're downloading. Of course nothing substitutes for using good practices when it comes to deciding whether to install a program and its possible implications.

Read on for the code itself. It is a very simple script that makes it easy to copy the location of a file from a website and then download and uncompress the file. It could be much fancier but it does the trick.

#!/bin/sh

if [ $# -ne 1 ]; then
         echo 1>&2 Usage: dget URL
         exit 127
fi

curl $1 | tar xzv

To use this script on Mac OS X copy it into a text file. You then need to set permissions to make it executable. The easiest way to do this is:

chmod a+x dget

Fred Anderson (1922-2008)

January 11, 2008

A very sad passing this week. Fred Anderson was Mr. Nevada Boys' State. For decades Anderson has been the face of Nevada Boys' State both in Nevada and at national conventions. It is hard to imagine just what next summer's session will be without Fred's "oh golly" and recounting of how this year's group of kids is the best we've seen.

Fred W. Anderson

Fred W. Anderson passed away on January 7, 2008 at the age of 85. Born March 21, 1922 in Colrein, MA to Fred W. Anderson and Ida Larson Anderson. Fred moved to Fallon, NV in 1926 at the age of 4. He attended Fallon schools and graduated from Churchill County High School in 1940. After high school he worked for the railroad until entering the Navy in 1943. He was released from the Navy in 1946. Fred then attended Utah State Agricultural College from 1946-1951 (graduated in 1950) and entered the Army in June of 1951-November 1952. Fred also attended the University of Washington. He moved back to Fallon where he taught school from 1953-1981. During his school teaching years and to date, he was very active in the American Legion serving every office on the Post level, District level, and Department level. He also served as State Commander in 1971-1972 and as National Vice Commander over the 13 western states in 1975-76. Fred was the American Legion Baseball Chairman for 4 years, State Oratorical Chairman for 3 years, and was Director of Nevada Boys State from 1973 through 1992. He served as State Adjutant of American Legion 4 years between 1982 and 1987. Fred has been a volunteer at the Reno Veterans Hospital from April 1983 until present and was selected as Volunteer of the Year in 1995. For 3 years he served on the American Legion National Commission on Children and Youth and then served on National Security Commission from 1978 through the present time. In addition to this, Fred was an avid college football fan and enjoyed recording as many stats as humanly possible in one Saturday afternoon.

Fred is survived by his wife of 36 years, Ivy G. Anderson, step sons: Gerald York (Marlene) and Charles York, sister: Margaret Wheeler, nephews: John Gill and Jim Gill, grandchildren: Bryan York, Theresa York, Risa Lopez, Leanne Crawford, and Susan Alexander.

Fred was a very generous and caring individual who always put others first. He was a dedicated servant to the public and asked nothing in return. He will be missed but not forgotten by not only his family, but by all the others whose lives he touched.

A funeral service with military honors for Fred will be held at 1 p.m. on Saturday January 12, 2008, at Walton Funeral Home Sierra Chapel, 875 W. 2nd St., Reno.

Published in the Reno Gazette-Journal from 1/10/2008.

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